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Una Storia Segreta
The Secret Story Video of Italian American Internment During WWIIForum sponsored by Anti Bias Committee of UNICO National at Bloomfield College June 20
BLOOMFIELD, N.J. -- The first annual Mille Grazie Awards Program recognizing efforts to unveil the secret story of Italian Americans interned during World War II will be sponsored by the Anti-Bias Committee of UNICO National and Bloomfield College on Wednesday, June 20 at 7 p.m. at Bloomfield College, Bloomfield, N.J.
This inaugural event will recognize individuals who promoted national awareness of The Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties during World War II.
The ABC UNICO program will feature the Una Storia Segreta - The Secret Story video. The viewing will be hosted by Frank Cipolla, who helped publicized the Secret Story of Italian Americans Interned during W.W.II. Cipolla, currently a reporter for WCBS All-News Radio 88, got his big break in his broadcast career at the centennial celebration for the Statue of Liberty. He has since joined others in promoting the secret story.
In addition, UNICO National - the largest Italian American service organization in the United States -will honor Cipolla and other individuals that helped produce the video. John Calvelli, Larry DiStasi and Tony LaPiana were key in enlightening the American people of this forgotten history and will be honored off campus. The video and cross-country tour of the Segreta display were instrumental in encouraging Congress to formulate legislation and President Clinton to sign the Wartime Violation act in November. The law directs the U.S. Justice Department to conduct a review of the government's treatment of Italian Americans during World War II.
The Mille Grazie Awards Program is free and open to the public, however, seating is limited, and reservations are required. For reservations and/or information, call ABC Chairman Dr. Emanuele Alfano (973) 429-2818.
UNA STORIA SEGRETA
• Immigrants spent months in jail for their opinions.
People lost their honor, because of their last names.
This is what happened once before, when Americans,
in fear and at war, turned on their own.
Providence Journal
BY Jennifer Levitz
Journal Staff Writer
October 7, 2001
The FBI swept through Federal Hill, knocking on doors: Give us your radios,
your cameras, your flashlights. Your "contraband."
In one house, a mother cried, her 4-foot-10 frame shaking. She needed her
radio to hear news of the war. Her four boys were in the U.S. armed forces,
she said, pointing to silver stars in the window, one for each son.
On the north side of the city, Frank D'Allesandro, almost 9 and nicknamed
"dottore" for his dreams of becoming a doctor, was home alone when the
knocks came.
The FBI agent used big words. The little boy looked them up in the dictionary,
after he handed over his BB gun.
It was December 1941. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States declared war on Japan. Benito Mussolini, the histrionic Italian dictator who
promised he would create an empire, stood with Germany and Japan.
Italy was now the enemy.
So were Italian-Americans.
UNA STORIA SEGRETA , some call it -- the secret history of what befell
Italian immigrants when the land they adopted looked on them with mistrust.
Now, 60 years later, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating possible violations of the civil rights of these Americans.
There is support among German-Americans for a similar study of the treatment
of their immigrants.
But the Italians will learn of the scope of the injustices against them next
month, when the Justice Department is scheduled to present the findings of
the year-long study.
Explained Justice Department investigater Joanne Chiedi: "The only thing
wrong was that they were Italian."
The little-known slice of wartime history is preserved in documents at the
National Archives. Several boxes of papers were only recently declassified,
at the request of The Journal.
These Justice Department and FBI memos, proclamations, and telephone
transcripts show that the United States, fearing sabotage and shielded from constitutional laws by the executive orders of President Franklin Roosevelt,
seized radios, flashlights, and other "contraband" from Italian-Americans.
The government restricted their travel, and ordered 10,000 Italian residents
of the West Coast and some 400 of the East Coast to leave their homes
because they lived too close to waterways, where they might, the government
feared, signal enemy ships.
Some 600,000 noncitizen Italian immigrants -- more than 11,000 in Rhode
Island -- had to register as card-carrying "enemy aliens."
As many as 300 Italian-Americans across the country were interned, often
based on little more than gossip. Of a Providence shoeshine man, the U.S. Department of Justice wrote:
"Subject's persistent talk in praising and boasting of the greatness of the
Italian people and Italian army while employed in a shoeshining shop
constitutes downright subversive activity."
The chaos of war, time, and shame have hidden the story.
But for many Italian-Americans, memories remain.
"THEY CAME FOR our radio," says the elderly woman sitting at a long
table at Federal Hill House, where she goes for the company and the
two-dollar lunch.
Her name is Concetta Dell Fave Fagan.
Over the din of The Pr ice Is Right, she recalls that her father, Michele
Dell Fave, was a citizen during World War II. Her mother, Antonetta Dell
Fave, was not.
After four of the Dell Fave sons had gone off to fight for the United States,
the family would hover in the kitchen around their radio. They listened for
news that might mean William, Dominic, Vito, and Joe would soon return.
An American flag and four Silver Stars, one for each son, hung in the window.
"You had a Gold Star," notes Fagan, "if your son didn't come home."
The day the FBI knocked at the door, her mother, just 74 pounds, begged
the agent not to take the family's radio. She pointed to the stars in the
window. Her sons were fighting for the United States, she said; why would
she do anything to hurt this country?
The agent said he had orders.
"She was crying," says Fagan, bowing her head to hide tears. "My father
wasn't. I guess men didn't cry then."
A table away from Fagan, a man with wispy gray hair slams down a beefy
arm, shaking his dish of cole slaw.
"In America?" he demands. "No! In Russia or the old country, maybe. If they
came in my house, I'd throw them out -- 'Who are you to come in my house?
You're invading me.' "
He gives his name only as Sal, and says that he is an Italian-American veteran
of World War II.
At the same table another elderly man, Frank Grelle, holds up a hand, missing
one finger. He used to sell lemons on Federal Hill; the war took his finger.
He agrees with his friend.
"That's right," says Grelle. "[Your property] don't belong to them."
"It don't belong to them," echoes Sal. "The man is right -- there is no way
that happened in America."
AT THE TURN of the last century, Italian immigrants left a country torn by joblessness and social unrest. They came to the United States for a better
life. By 1920, there were 60,000 of them living in Rhode Island.
Many were laborers who had settled in triple-deckers on Providence's
Federal Hill, where they walked to the Holy Ghost Church for baptisms,
weddings, and Mass in Italian.
The United States was your wife, the saying went; Italy, your mother.
You honored both.
So in the 1930s they listened with fascination to their radios, to the leader
who orated from the Palazzo de Venezia. Benito Mussolini promised he
would raise Italy to its former Roman glory. He would give land to the
peasants, and restore order.
So deep was the longing to protect Italy, that when Mussolini called for gold,
in 1936, to fight League of Nations economic sanctions, immigrants in Rhode
Island sent him 100 pounds of wedding bands.
But in time, it grew risky to speak with passion about Italy, where Il Duce
was showing himself to be a dictator. Then he signed the "Pact of Steel"
with Hitler.
Embarrassment replaced the gushing tributes to Mussolini.
As Germany toppled country after country, with Italy as its ally, the U.S.
entry into war against the Axis powers seemed imminent. And in America,
people started looking at fellow Americans of German or Italian descent in
a new way.
The owner of a textile company in Taunton, Mass., L. N. Gebhard, wrote to
U.S. Atty. Gen. Francis Biddle about Ivan M. Lombardo, a printing-company executive of Italian background -- and a friend of Gebhard's.
Saying that he wished to be "damnably" sure that his friend wasn't a
"potential enemy agent," Gebhard wrote that Lombardo's expressed hatred
for Mussolini might in fact be a cover for enemy work.
"I recognize," wrote Gebhard, in November 1940, "that the more skillful
enemy agents would cleverly embrace such a position."
In response, Acting Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. Hugh A. Fisher urged Gebhard
to report any "subversive activities" by Lombardo to the FBI in Boston.
That year, L'Eco del Rhode Island, the Italian newspaper, celebrated the gains
of Italian-Americans in the Rhode Island General Assembly.
But it was not the time to seem too Italian. Ethnic ties could be seen as a
sign of disloyalty to America.
Rhode Island's Italian-Americans canceled their Columbus Day parade.
THEN, they became enemy aliens.
"All natives, citizens, denizens, and subjects of a hostile nation are alien
enemies," stated Roosevelt's 1940 Alien Enemy Act.
In Rhode Island, 11,792 Italian, 692 German, and 11 Japanese residents
over the age of 14 lined up to register at the Providence post office, entering
through a side door where mail trucks parked.
L'Eco del Rhode Island called the registration "grossly un-American and
fantastically absurd."
U.S. Attorney General Biddle said the phrase "enemy alien" was a legal
definition, not a charge of disloyalty.
But it was.
And stigma of suspicion spread even to people not classified as enemy
aliens.
In Rhode Island, the FBI designated 2,147 Italian-Americans, including
U.S. citizens, as "potential and active hostile individuals." Even the church,
the heart of the Italian community, was suspect.
The U.S. Naval Intelligence Service reported on "alleged fascism" at 13
Rhode Island Roman Catholic churches. The report said that priests in
these churches had been brought over from Italy, and that even after
extended stays in the United States, they spoke little English. The Italian government, said the report, awarded the clergymen with medals and other
honors, in order to keep them "sold."
The Rev. Flaminio Parenti, pastor of Federal Hill's beloved Holy Ghost
Church, became a target.
He had served as pastor since 1922, having come from New York City,
where he ministered to the needy. In 1930 the Italian Consul in Providence
gave him the medal bestowed on distinguished Italians who work to extend
the Italian culture in foreign countries.
To Lawrence M. C. Smith, the War Department's chief of the neutrality laws,
writing to the FBI's Hoover in 1942, this award ceremony and others like it
were opportunities to "spread subtle fascist propaganda."
"The beauties of Italy are dwelt upon," write Smith, "and then come the
advances in the past 20 years. It is at this point the speakers become
expansive on Mussolini."
Smith noted that at the award ceremonies, the Italian Consul General and
his staff "occupy the most prominent positions on the platform."
"They have built themselves up so that the Italians feel that it is a great
honor [particularly among the poorer element] to be recognized by the
consular staff," he wrote.
To fully grasp the significance of such a situation, he wrote, "one must bear
in mind that the Italian people are a very devout race."
And loyal. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Rhode Island's Italian-American
leaders rushed to show their patriotism.
On Dec. 12, 1941, the day after the United States declared war on Italy,
Providence District Court Judge Luigi de Pasquale read a statement from
the bench in Providence:
"We will, in the future, as we have in the past, show undivided loyalty to
the United States. . . . This is not the time for sentiment except in favor
of this land."
THE PLEDGES of loyalty made little difference. Italians were marked.
In early 1942 , after a Senate committee reported that Japanese-Americans
had aided Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government stepped up
its scrutiny of enemy aliens. The report later proved false, but the damage was done, according to Larry DiStasi, who has written Una Storia Segreta, a book documenting the "secret history" of the treatment of Italian-Americans during World War II.
.....Continued to Part 1B
...Continued from Part 1A
Most affected were Italians on the West Coast.
Attorney General Biddle ordered Japanese, Italian, and German aliens --
including fishermen -- away from the waterfront of San Francisco.
Guiseppe DiMaggio could not fish for a living, despite the fact that his son
Joe DiMaggio, the baseball star for the Yankees, had enlisted in the Army,
according to another son (a professional ball player for the Red Sox), Dominic DiMaggio. He was testifying in 1999 before a congressional committee in
favor of the Wartime Violations of Italian American Civil Liberties Act.
The act, which was adopted that year, was sponsored by U.S. Rep. Eliot
Engel, a Democrat from New York City, after hearing about DiStasi's book
and traveling exhibit, about the "secret history."
The legislation required the government to formally acknowledge that there
had been a fundamental injustice against Italian-Americans. It directed the
justice department to report to Congress about immigrants who were affected.
The justice department's report, according to the act, will allow federal
agencies, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, to offer such
things as lectures and exhibits about that chapter of war.
The report is also expected to examine how apparent xenophobia became government policy, and how to prevent it from happening again.
During wartime, the harshest directive against the immigrants came on
Feb. 19, 1942, when President Roosevelt signed infamous Executive Order
9066. It allowed the War Department to declare entire sections of the
Western states off limits to immigrants from enemy nations.
The order first forced the relocation of 100,000 people of Japanese descent.
Then, more than 10,000 people of Italian descent were forced out of their
homes.
Humboldt University Prof. Stephen Fox documented the plight of West
Coast Italian-Americans in his 1990 book, The Unknown Internment.
"The way the government decided where people had to move from was
completely arbitrary," he said in an interview. "In Arcata [Calif.] one side of
the street was off-limits, because it was too close to the water, to ships. . . .
People literally had to move across the street."
Seeing that the West Coast evacuations were politically toxic, Roosevelt
stopped plans for evacuations on the East Coast, Fox said.
But Gen. Hugh A. Drum, head of the Eastern Defense Command, had an
alternate plan for the East Coast: "exclusions," or evictions, of people who
had not committed overt acts, but who participated in subversive associations
or activities.
What were these associations and activities?
Philadelphia pediatrician Zefferino Aversa, an American citizen, was given
10 days to leave his home and move a couple of hours inland. Aversa had
served in the Royal Italian Army before moving to the United States, in 1928.
And he had a point of view.
"Blamed Pres. Roosevelt for U.S. Entry in present war. Stated Axis powers
would give the U.S. a good lesson," says the 1943 report on his case.
Some officials, including Attorney General Biddle, questioned the
"reasonableness" of exclusions. He wrote: "Most cases simply involved
uninfluential people who in opinions, exhibited sympathy for . . . the countries
of their birth."
Along the East Coast, Italians had to turn in short-wave radios, so they could
not pick up Italian news. Cameras and flashlights were contraband; being
caught with invisible ink was a crime.
On Federal Hill, Tomasso Baccari gave up his radio. It "hurt him profoundly,"
says his son.
TOMASSO BACCARI HAD moved to the United States in 1905, for the
golden opportunity. But, says his son, Vincent Baccari, he struggled to find
the gold.
He was a bricklayer. His wife stretched a nickel's worth of cornmeal and a
few tomatoes into Italian polenta. When his children's shoes wore thin, he
placed cardboard in the soles. And on Sundays he listened to his radio as
Mussolini promised to restore the splendor of imperial Rome.
"There would be tears in his eyes," says his son. "He was torn between the
land he was born in and loved, and the land he adopted."
In the wake of the Alien Enemy Act, the younger Baccari dutifully put the
radio on his shoulder and walked from Federal Hill's Rich Street to the police
station.
"He was not going to be an enemy," he says of his father. "He was going to
be a friend.
"He was devastated-- he didn't understand. He had been a lawful citizen,
God-fearing and lawful."
His father never said much about the radio, says Baccari, nor did he tell
friends, for fear of appearing un-American.
"Let it die, let it die," he said.
Vincent Baccari, now a retired lawyer and still living on Federal Hill, sits in
the lobby of the Veterans Administration hospital after a monthly meeting
of the Rhode Island Italian-American War Veterans.
One of the men quietly says to a visitor, "Do you know who we are?" He holds
up a red overseas cap, adorned with pins.
More than half a million Italian-Americans fought for the United States in
World War II.
"We want an apology from the U.S. government," says Baccari. "We want
them to say, 'Yes, we were wrong.' "
That's right, says Antonio Alfano, 81, another veteran. "Because they took
the sons of aliens."
"We contributed," says Baccari.
Dante DiManna, 83, nods. "Four years, nine months, and fourteen days."
The men walk outside, where an American flag waves in the warm breeze.
.........(Continued in Part 2)
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